Lou Pugliese, CEO of Moodlerooms, said Blackboard’s purchase of his company and another firm that hosts and supports the popular open-source learning management system (LMS) Moodle should be welcome news to educators who support the open-source movement over proprietary options because, finally, an open platform has the financial backing of a large company.

Blackboard, by far the largest LMS provider to U.S. colleges and universities, announced March 26 that the company had purchased two providers of the open-source Moodle LMS platform, Moodlerooms and Australia-based NetSpot.

Pugliese said Blackboard’s massive customer base would be a built-in market for Moodlerooms’ open LMS, which has, until now, relied heavily on word-of-mouth promotion from campus to campus.

“This will allow us to work much more aggressively in a much more contributory way to open source,” he said in an interview with eCampus News, adding that “nothing changes” in Moodlerooms’ leadership in the wake of the Blackboard acquisition. “We’re now resourced in ways that we couldn’t contribute before. Blackboard has a very significant customer base into which open source can be introduced. Those customers can now be contributors to the community both from a technical perspective and from an academic perspective.”

Blackboard has seen campuses slowly migrate away from proprietary LMS software that was dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and toward LMS platforms that use open source code to customize course websites. About half of nonprofit universities now use Blackboard, down from 71 percent in 2006, according to the Campus Computing Project.

Moodle’s share of the higher-education LMS market has grown by 15 percent since 2006. About one-fourth of nonprofit campuses use an open-source LMS. Source codes for open LMS programs like Moodle are free, but many schools hire companies like Moodlerooms to host and customize course web pages.

Blackboard said Moodlerooms, founded in 2005, would become part of its new “education open-source services group,” which will support and develop open-source learning technologies globally. But Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure, which developed another open-standard LMS called Canvas, said he is skeptical of Blackboard’s new promotion of open-source learning in higher education.

“They don’t care what LMS you pick,” Coates wrote in a blog post. “They will gladly take your money for whatever flavor of LMS you choose, as long as they can bill you for generic IT software and services.”

Blackboard’s wealth of technology and financial resources, Coates said, won’t guarantee that educators who use the Moodle platform will see an improved product in the coming weeks and months.